Please Pass the Butter ( My Story, Part Four)

I may have felt alive and ecstatic, but I knew something was off.

Part of it was my loss of appetite.  It’s not normal to live on spinach.  

I didn’t really think that my new VA-VOOM personality was a problem.  In fact, I kind of wondered where I’d been all my life.  Though even I had to admit that the way that the songs on the radio seemed to be full of special messages just for me . . .that was different and new and maybe not quite right? 

Oh well!  Who cared!

I didn’t want to go to my regular doctor.  I think I knew that she’d probe and find out about the blues that had plagued me earlier and I didn’t want to think about them anymore.  They were in the past!  I wanted to know why I was losing weight and feeling different.  That’s all.  

We found a doctor who was more into the holistic approach towards medicine.  When I told her that I’d dropped a dramatic amount of weight without trying in a short period of time, her eyes got very, very serious.

She did some testing and declared that I had candida.  I did not know what that meant.  As best I can, let me tell you what she told me.  Basically, candida is the “nice” way of saying “yeast infection”.  We all have yeast in our bodies, but sometimes the yeast goes nuts.  

It was in my gut.  And there it was sucking all the nutrition out of me.  Everything I ate, it took.  I was starving in my own skin and didn’t even know it.

Fortunately the doctor had a remedy.  I don’t remember everything I left her office with that day but I do know that I was put on a high powered probiotic.  She explained to me that in your digestive system are “good” guys and “bad” guys.  She said the bad guys were winning and I needed reinforcements.  Thus the good guys, probiotics.  They’d kick candida’s butt for me, or else.

Or else what?  She wouldn’t say.  “Go home and research it” she said, instead.

My family all sighed in relief.  My brother confided that I was so skinny it scared him.

My dad, the stockmen, said that when calves went off their feed probiotics made them better.

I took my medicine and was a good patient.  

And no one said anything about my abnormal cheerfulness.  If any of us had known anything about Bipolar at that point we might have know what was coming.  But we didn’t.

We just smiled and nodded at each other and passed the butter.